The Coffee Tour
If you only believe one thing that we say from this holiday believe that this was one of the greatest tours we were ever on. The owner of the Hidden Canopy Treehouse arranged the tour. We got collected here and it was a 30 min journey over an amazing valley to the farm.
Maybe I am biased since I grew up on small farm but it was humbling since the coffee farm was run by Victor who had worked at a coffee coop for years and then started his own coffee label. My grandparents had a self sustaining farm for years and here it really felt like someone was trying to make the model work so it was really impressive.
Coffee starts as a little berry and when it is ripe (usually red or yellow) it gets hand picked, dried, roasted, and ground. On this tour we saw the traditional method of coffee harvesting and the modern method. We even got to roast our own coffee beans the old way in a pan over a stove. We learned that the best way to make coffee is not how we get it at home. The coffee berry is covered in three layers with honey in between. Most coffee around the world is ‘washed’ which means two layers and the honey is removed before the drying process making drying the bean faster (7 days) but this drastically changes the flavour of the coffee. The best way to dry the coffee is to dry the honey along with bean. You can do that by just picking the bean and letting it dry which takes a minimum of 22 days or you can remove the first layer, keeping the honey intact and let the bean dry which takes a little less time (about 14 days) but still retains the honey. We only found out that a coffee beans natural coat is honey when we got to taste it here. The natural coating is a lovely sweet barrier. We were amazed and never realised it would taste as sweet. But in a world of effiency and profit most companies spend excessive water resources to wash natural honey off the coffee bean to make it dry faster.
The other thing that was amazing was that Victor’s farm was completely organic, he grew every kind of fruit tree to shade his coffee plants (coffee needs a lot of shade) and also provide nutrients. There were banana, avocados, Mandrin limes (orange coloured sour limes), sweet lemons, pineapples and citronella plants all to either shade the plant or provide the nutrients. He refuses to use any pesticides or chemicals.
It was incredible on a small farm to see the effort Victor was making to make the highest quality product in the most natural way possible. We were the only people on the tour and the family were there to show us around. At the end they even gave us coffee we roasted ourselves to take home. An excellent tour, very educational giving us a greater appreciation of the work that goes into high quality organic coffee.
